Cure for Chaos: The Power of Checklists

Welcome to this New Year, and a renewed opportunity to achieve major goals for your business. It's also time to take a renewed look at your operation. Do you still have a lot of errors or rework?

If you have been following along with past articles in The Organizer newsletter, you know I spent more than ten years totally systematizing my operation and have been able to virtually eliminate chaos in our business.

As with my book System Busters: How to Stop Them in Your Business, I talk about the power of checklists that make the necessary details of your operation a no-brainer. Checklists are not for "dummies," but for busy, normal human beings who simply can't remember everything about everything all the time.

Checklists are not unique to good order in business. Many of the budget-killing mistakes that risk customer loyalty can be dramatically reduced or eliminated by putting together simple checklists, and getting everyone to follow them. Ah, there's the rub, you say! We found a way.

Consider the following who have implemented checklists that have saved whole companies from disaster; saved money and time, but also many lives.

Medical Checklists
Disturbed by the thousands of needless deaths in hospitals, due to infections, renowned John Hopkins Hospital critical-care specialist, Dr. Peter Pronovost, put together a simple five-step checklist in 2001 for installing lines in the human body during care. Almost immediately, infection rates plummeted at John Hopkins. Sadly, Dr. Pronovost could not get hospitals interested, primarily because physicians felt they didn't need checklists to do their job. Sound familiar? Finally, Dr. Pronovost got the State of Michigan to try his simple checklists in a handful of the worst hospitals in the country. Results? In December, 2006, the Keystone Initiative published its findings in a landmark article in The New England Journal of Medicine: Within the first three months of the project, the infection rate of Michigan ICUs decreased by 65%. In the Keystone Initiative's first eighteen months, the hospitals saved an estimated $175 million in costs and more than 1,500 lives.

Checklists inspired by the B-17 Bomber
Boeing almost went bankrupt when one of their top pilots crashed a newly-designed bomber right in front of top military brass. Realizing their new generation of aircraft was too complicated for even the best pilots, Boeing created a simple checklist and proceeded to sell over 13,000 planes that flew over 1.8 million miles without a crash.

Downloading
The place to begin creating a checklist system that will drive your operation is in your own mind, Mr. Owner/CEO. All the business of your business is in your head, and all your company documents and procedures should be written and gathered together in your Operations Manual. We have taken this a step further by developing a browser-based, Intranet software called System100 that includes each process in your operation in an online format, able to be accessed instantly by all personnel. This checklist system has been the cure for chaos in our company!

Daily Routine Checklists for Personnel
The Daily Routine Checklist is like the job description, developed into a detailed checklist of duties in the order a person performs them, from the time they arrive at work until they leave. It is to be prominently located for easy use, either on an employee's desk or a clipboard by their workstation. With this document you, the owner or manager, also have for your reference a list of everything each employee does. Daily Routine Checklists are your eyes to see every task and duty performed in your organization, fom taking the mail to the post office to mopping the floors. These checklists, followed correctly, one step at a time, stop errors from being repeated, and virtually eliminate procrastination and chaos.

Quality and Service Control Checklists
Quality and Service Control Checklists are crucial to any company that wants to guarantee quality and service. Every company and organization has a product it is selling or promoting. Your product may be a service, but it should be quality service. A verbal commitment to quality and service is about as predictable as bubbles in the air. Without a checklist system you cannot guarantee or prove quality or service, because you are a fallible human being, and you can't remember to complete every process consistently.

Have you ever read something and it turns out you have read it wrong? Or, you were supposed to do something and it turns out you didn't, but you "just knew" you had? My point exactly. We're human, and we don't see or do things the same way every time. Our mind may be thinking about numerous things, or something major, and overlooking something small.

Imagine your next business trip, and how your airline pilot might be focusing on the weather or passengers, when he misses a small light alerting him his landing gear is up or down. Thankfully, airline pilots use detailed checklists that keep you and me safe from such mishaps!

Did I say good systems work?